Here’s what we call progress

24 May 2008

The Spectator on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill

It is greatly to David Cameron’s credit that he voted for the ‘male role model’ amendment. Quite rightly, Mr Cameron has reached out a hand to non-traditional Tory voters and made it a hallmark of his leadership that the Conservative party welcomes ethnic minorities, gay men and women and people of all faiths. In the teeth of opposition from some in his movement, he has shown himself commendably determined that the Tories should represent and seek to govern Britain as it is — rather than Britain as it was in the 1950s. Even so, he has not, as some allege, been seduced by Sixties liberalism. Far from it: part of his strategy has been to find a way of matching the unprecedented pluralism of modern life with the need for guard-rails: hence his unswerving support for marriage, and for ‘male role models’ in IVF treatment. Those who conclude that this makes him a reactionary and a homophobe reveal only the poverty of their own arguments.

In fact, Mr Cameron is redefining what it means to be a ‘progressive’. For the liberal Left, progress has its roots in the philosophy of the 18th and 19th century — the teleological notion that there was an implacable drive towards a uniform, centrally defined perfect society. History had a direction, conveniently ‘identified’ (for which read, ‘dictated’) by the fortunate few. In the Sixties, that Hegelian dialectic was grafted on to a cultural revolution: many of the people who grew up in that era are now running the world.

But their time is past. Progress today means accepting that families need fathers: not for religious reasons or in homage to the Victorians, but because all the empirical evidence tells us that this is so. Progress means recognising that redistribution by the Treasury has not solved the problem of endemic poverty: that the root causes of broken families, addiction, debt, illiteracy and powerlessness must be addressed if our society is not to become fatally divided.

Progress means declaring that the postwar state has had many terrible unintended consequences, not least the growth of welfare dependency and the attendant loss of human dignity. Progress means accepting that our public services are not sacred institutions: the respective visions of Crosland for the comprehensive system and Bevan for the NHS are not holy writ. Gordon Brown gave an impressive speech last week on ‘people power’ and the ‘wisdom of crowds’ at the Google Zeitgeist forum in Hertfordshire. But his words are not matched by the policies of his government, which still favours command-and-control over genuine devolution to the neighbourhood and the citizen. Again, the truly progressive position lies in the delegation of power, not in the diktats of the postwar state. Uniformity is the hallmark of the old; pluralism is the chief characteristic of the new. The challenge for Mr Cameron, should he win the next election, will be to make real his promise of ‘post-bureaucratic’ government in which this ancien régime is genuinely transformed. It is, as he knows, a huge task. But it the right objective, a worthy campaign to match the structure of the state to the contours of modernity.

The Crewe by-election marked the last gasp of a certain style of politics: Labour’s pathetic bid to stoke a local class war was the worst sort of divisiveness, an attempt to defend the Left’s status quo by creating a social battle where none existed. That is not the way forward. When killing babies and abolishing fatherhood is described as a victory for ‘progress’, you know it is time to think again.